Be kind to your fine feathered (and designer-clad) friends

Daphne Merkin thinks we (and this is the NYT "we," meaning "we super-rich, super-educated, and super-trendy people from Manhattan") spoil our dogs. To Merkin, it's terrible that dogs continued to be pampered while society's needy remain impoverished. I've heard (and responded to) this argument before, when it last appeared in the Times, and so will not rehash all the obvious arguments now. Read my earlier post if you're curious.

While putting your dog in Prada may be unneccesary from a dog's point of view, it makes the owner happy, and, unlike putting your child in Prada, your dog will not grow up into an Upper East Side beeatch, but will simply remain the charming bitch she always was.

Men want to get married. Women don't.

According to New York Magazine dating columnist Amy Sohn, "men are just as susceptible to biology’s imperatives." Sohn discusses men who "bring up marriage and kids in the first few dates and know stroller brands the way some men know speaker systems," and claims these men are not popular in the NYC dating scene. Such men might consider moving to Kyrgyzstan, where men really, really want to get married and women don't have much of a say in the matter. These NYC men should not, however, romanticize the American South, since Southern belles are abducting themselves these days, only to escape the unpleasant world of bridal showers and massive weddings.

"Do you know how many points two small bourekas are?"

Six, according to this fascinating article about Israeli teens on Weight Watchers. While Israeli kids risk getting blown up when they go to cafes, it seems they face a more mundane risk as well: Globally, "Israel is in ninth place in the proportion of children who are in danger of becoming fat."

You can learn a lot about a culture by reading its diet articles. France seems to be worried about the influence of paquets de chips (i.e. American influence) and the evil food industry, whereas Israel has other concerns: "Niv describes the situation in the kitchen of her home during the past year: 'First of all, there is hardly anything sweet. After that, if I used to have two corn schnitzels after school, and a bowl of chicken with a side dish or pasta, now I have only two corn schnitzels or a bowl of pasta. That's all I can have.'" I don't know what corn schitzels are, but they sound substantial. (Niv, the supposedly fat girl whose photo accompanies the article, is thin by Chicago standards and more or less average by Manhattan ones.) And then, after a class trip on which a the teen lost weight, seemingly through dehydration: "She just didn't feel well, so she ascended Masada in the cable car and did not walk down the Snake Trail. Yes, and for two days she ate nothing. Now Niv stands on the scale and Riki Ashin writes 1,000 grams less on the card. A whole kilo got left behind in the desert."

Who knew? Not me, at any rate...

I must be oblivious or something, but until Sam told me what an eruv was, I had no idea that there's a string around the Upper East Side, the neighborhood I grew up in, that permits various things to be done on the Sabbath that usually can't be done. A Google search reveals that, regardless, the one on the UES might not even count. Frankly, to me this sounds a bit like cheating, having a string that makes you exempt from religious laws, but I clearly don't understand the concept.

Another, unrelated, query: I am not keeping kosher for Passover, but if I were, would the definite traces of non-kosher-for-Passover bread products in my keyboard cause problems?

Clearly I am cut out for a secular life.

On campus

Just spent much of the afternoon in a mad search for my grammar-checked BA, which was not in the box I'd thought, but in a different box in a different building, which in retrospect was less confusing than it seemed at the time. It appears that I do not know the difference between imparfait and passé composé. Will try to learn the difference by early next week.

And...dude, look, there's a U of C classroom! Looks like it's one of the mini-lecture halls on the first floor of Harper.

All time is one

OK, French Jews of the late 19th century, stop giving me grief. Stop being all complex and confused, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Are you people elusive, or have I just not been reading the right books? Gourmet potato chips from Ex Libris and a medium coffee from that same basement coffee shop might not be enough to get me through this. But they will have to do.

Oral defense

I have to prove I know all about the Dreyfus Affair, and that I can convey this in spoken French. This is set to happen next Thursday. Hot iron prongs may be involved. If there are posts from me between 3 and 3:30 PM, that's a bad sign.

In other news...the Westchester County District attorney, Jeanine F. Pirro, was quoted in an NYT article about suburban teens' partying habits as saying, "Teenage drinking is an epidemic," and, "If people think kids are drinking a beer or a glass of wine with a slice of pizza, they're wrong." Well, the problem is, it's illegal for teens (and a large number of 20-somethings) to have a glass of wine or a beer with dinner. I've been carded ordering a glass of wine with dinner in Chicago, not because I'm likely to drive drunk (I'm not likely to drive, period) but because that's the law. What I'm getting at is, it doesn't so much matter whether the kids in the suburbs are fools or budding oenophiles, they're still breaking the law, and if the cops knew about a super-sophisticated underage wine tasting, they'd be obligated to break it up. So it's sort of pointless to discuss whether or not the Westchester kids are reasonable drinkers, when the law permits plenty of idiotic drinking from the of-age and no drinking whatsoever from the underage.

In other other news...Sorry, but no beards. I don't care what the Thursday Stylists say, clean-shaven's the way to go. But to make one more point about male appearance before the BA-writing for the evening begins in earnest...men, even skinny men, do not look good in women's pants. I understand that there's this impulse--which I applaud--to abandon baggy pants in favor of something a bit more fitted. But pants made for women tend to make men look like women, and some of them guys I've seen in these pants seem not to be otherwise effeminate, do not appear to be the target audience of UChicago's infamous gender-neutral bathrooms, but seem more like confused hipsters. Let the confusion end and the narrow-cut men's pants begin.

Ugh, once more

I'm thinking of starting a new blog devoted entirely to the disgusting things I've witnessed people doing at the library. Just now, like ten seconds ago, the man across from me--not the nail-clipper of yesterday, a different man--picked his nose. Thoroughly. A former Maroon fellow-editor came up to me at the library about a month ago to report on some less-than-sanitary (and no, not sexual) activities going on in the men's room. Now I understand people want to be comfortable when they study, but there are limits.

More cheese UPDATED

Three different people have sent me the cheese article from the NYT, which turns out to be the paper's most-emailed article. (The Marian Burros article on the discourse of the metaphysics of oatmeal was only ever second-most emailed, I believe.) Actually, four, if you count someone who knew I'd already read it and only sent it to me after I told him that three others already had. This is bad news. I really, really want some cheese. But this would require leaving the library, where I have a sonnet to reconstruct, a paper to finish, and a few sad M&Ms remaining from my evening chocolate course, such as it was. I don't want M&Ms. I want cheese, and maybe a green salad and some bread. OK, no more blogging, time for some efficient paper-writing with the goal of a happily cheesy conclusion to all of this.

UPDATE

I've just received a barrage of NYT-cheese-article emails, from people I think are members of the track team. Thanks, Sam!

French Jews on my mind

How did it come to pass that I'm studying and am mildly obsessed with French Jews? I've taken French since third grade and have been Jewish since--and here the phrase "since God knows when" would be appropriate. It occurred to me that I'm taking three classes, one of which is a French class, one Hebrew class, and one BA "class" which involves everything French and Jewish all rolled up into one, like a Marais falafel sandwich followed by a crepe (and I wonder why a gained a few pounds in Paris). For some reason, I feel more of a connection to the late-19th-century French Jews than to most American Jews or, certainly, than to most modern-day French people. I could go into why this is the case, or better yet...

This first chapter of a biography of Marcel Proust and this one of Woody Allen make for a good back-to-back read. The Allen first chapter mentions Proust ("'...the twenty-nine pictures that, all together, form a cumulative portrait of Woody Allen's life — documents comparable in obsession if not in depth to the seven volumes of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.'"), which I find worth noting because in a paper I wrote for a Proust class a while back, I argued that Proust's Freudian, Jewish sense of humor is not unlike Allen's, with the omnipresent mother and so forth. But beyond that, there's this sense that neighborhoods like the Faubourg Saint-Germain or the Upper East Side have a certain hold over Jews, who swallow whole the mystique in ways that non-Jews tend not to. Then again, I'm sure that if Nan Kempner were to swallow anything whole, it would be the mystique of the Upper East Side, so, as I do with most of my blog-debuted theories, I may have to abandon this one along with the rest.

Ugh!

Under no circumstances should you clip your nails at the library. The man across from me at the table I was, until about 30 seconds ago, seated at was (is?) doing this. Unacceptable. Nose-picking, moaning, muttering, all of this I can (and do) deal with on a regular basis from my fellow Reggians. But nail-clipping, again, not good.

Cheese porn

I want it all. And the slide show is just too much. Not, as they say, work-safe.

Camille Paglia is the epitome of hypocritical vapidity

Camille Paglia was on campus this evening, and I'm sorry to say that I wasted 90 minutes of my life listening to her diatribe. She's got an original voice, that's for sure, and she's talking now about how the left is to blame for all of the troubles of the world.

The main problem with Ms. Paglia is that she wants to take on all these problems of the world, but refuses to listen to the answers of anyone who actually has a Ph.D. and teaches at an institution of higher learning. She's the ultimate self-hating leftist: she blames the failure of the left not on the right, but on the left itself.

Her newest book is all about poetry and the poor state of the arts, which (like the left) has supposedly been undone by secular humanism (sound Ratzingerian to you?!) and needs to find "emotional resonance" to recapture its value in society.

I can't go into detail how many hyprocritical and absurd contradictions there are in Paglia's argument, so I'll elucidate just one. Paglia championed the movie Lawrence of Arabia and the era of 1960s filmmaking, and went on for a bit about the media in a post-9/11 world. I asked her how she felt that such a movie, which makes a hero of a British colonialist in a Muslim milieu, would speak to the post-9/11 world. I told her that while the films of the 1960s may have been great, they were also forms of social control. There were no gay people in those films, and the only people who really agree with her critique on modern society are those who want a return to hegemonic Protestant values in art, like Charles Murray.

A stunned audience (which, unfortunately for Ms. Paglia, I recognized from many of my gender studies classes) was told that "It doesn't matter that there aren't any gay people or black people or women in these films. That's the worst form of identity politics." She went on to note that no gay author since Stonewall has produced anything of quality; only those who came about in the era of oppression--she likes Tennessee Williams and deifies Oscar Wilde--truly produced great works.

That may be so, but Paglia hasn't read so far in Oscar Wilde's works to recognize that the man ended up in jail for being gay. Paglia champions pop culture without recognizing or admitting that there are forces that shape pop culture, and often not in ways that would preseve the leftism that Ms. Paglia values. She's so caught upin her own critique that she's far behind even the social conservatives, who are post-modern enough to understand that the war over discourse is a real and powerful one, with important consequences.

Paglia hates "snarky" writers, she says, and called Maureen Dowd an "intellectual midget." Thing is, Ms. Paglia, the only applause you got tonight was from your snarky comments about other people. And your books, in all their profligate copies, contain less intellectual content than even one of Ms. Dowd's better columns.

Get real, Camille Paglia. Go read some history, and go join the GOP.

To do (post-BA)

1) Haircut.

2) Buy Dookie, the CD version, as opposed to the tape I may or may not still have back in NYC.

3) Consider various iPossibilities, and probably decide against.

Hustlers, strivers, and forever-losing athletes

Jon Caramanica, in the Village Voice:

If I recall correctly, I was the only person from either of my two childhood zip codes—11234 in Mill Basin, 11235 in Sheepshead Bay—to arrive at Harvard that fall. And while my high school, Stuyvesant, was one of the biggest feeders to the Ivies every year, the lived experience of the two places couldn't have been more at odds.

At Stuyvesant, everyone was a hustler—a striver—from the school newspaper editors to the immigrant kids on the math team down to the jocks, perennially ignored and forever losing (Stuy had a profoundly inverted food chain). Almost no one took the days there for granted. In contrast, Harvard kids were, how you say, comfortable. Entitled.

Oh dear. I was apparently, as a "forever losing" high school athlete, at the bottom of the school's food chain. Perhaps the fact that my friends were mainly debaters or similar made me a bit cooler, though. Hard to say... But, on a less self-referential note, I'm guessing that part of why Caramanica perceived his Stuyvesant classmates to be hustlers and strivers was that he was Harvard-bound, with Harvard- (or, god forbid, Yale-) bound friends. Not everyone was like that. The admissions test has not a thing to do with drive, and it shows. Sure, a certain number of kids realize that they're smart, they might as well do something with that, but for many others, being at the school is just about having intelligent but gossipy conversations during class whenever the teacher wasn't looking.

No one "needs" segregated dorms

At Cornell, with 19,700 students, administrators have built 10 living-learning communities, called "program houses," over the past 35 years. Almost all are open to freshmen. "It's an opportunity for students to feel belonging and a sense of personalization in their education," says Donald H. King, the university's director of community development in campus life.

Among the program houses are one for the creative and performing arts (for majors and non-majors); Ecology House, for budding environmentalists; Ujamaa Residential College, for students interested in African-American culture; Akwe:kon, for those interested in American Indian culture, and the Holland International Living Center, for foreign and American students.

Living-learning communities have not been without controversy. Some critics object to the very concept of grouping like-minded individuals, limiting their exposure to different points of view. Others contend that houses based on race or ethnicity segregate members from the larger student body.
Mr. King disagrees. "We've argued this point," he says, after a civil rights group complained to the State Department of Education that Cornell had created segregated housing. The department ruled in 1995 that no laws or regulations had been violated. "The fact is that these houses are open to any students who wish to participate," he says. "What it does is provide a support base for students who need that type of association."

Even if Cornell isn't breaking any laws, having separate dorms for different races is really idiotic. For every black or Latino dorm created, that's one more dorm that becomes effectively all-white, that's a dozen more white people who don't meet any minorities in college, and so forth. Contrary to King's assertion, no student could possibly "need" to be in a living situation with those of any particular race. Colleges need to get past this idea of creating ultimate comfort zones, in which everything feels like home. If students want that, they'll find it on their own, but a college's role is to fight against that impulse.

The Storm in the Taiwan Straits...

Today, the head of the KMT party in Taiwan decided to pay a visit to the Chinese mainland, where he'll meet Chinese President Hu Jintao on Friday. The KMT, or Kuomintang, is the Nationalist party of Taiwan. This is the same political party that, 57 years ago, lost a civil war to the Chinese Communist Party and fled to Taiwan, taking with it many of China's imperial treasures.

The KMT ruled Taiwan with an dictatorial and corrupt fist for forty years, turning a country that had never really been incorporated into the Chinese sphere (and spent 50 years learning how to be Japanese) into a country of people who thought of themselves as Chinese, and the only place on Earth that still uses traditional (not simplified) Chinese characters and the Wade-Giles system of romanization (remember "Peking"?). The KMT is the reason that the name of Taiwan is still officially the Republic of China, and that for so long, Taiwan claimed to be the rightful government of China (and, oddly, Mongolia as well).

The opposition to the KMT, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), emerged only after years of violent political oppression. First elected to power in 2000, barely re-elected in 2004, and losing control of the legislature, the DPP still advocates greater independence from China (with the eventual but unspoken goal of de jure independence and statehood) and the KMT, in a strange twist of fate, has become the party of unification.

Now, Lien Chan, the head of the KMT, is going to China, when technically Taiwan and China are still at war, China has hundreds of cruise missiles aimed at the island, and the mainland just passed a law authorizing the use of force should Taiwan move towards independence in any way. To put it in persepctive, Lien's trip is equivalent to a French legislator visiting Germany to meet with Hitler in 1938. It is, at best, treasonous activity of the most vile form. President Chen Shui-bian, in a precarious political position, has been forced to legitimize the trip; he should not. Instead, he should retaliate by banning Lien from entering the country, lest Lien face an arrest warrant and a trial for treason on his arrival in Taipei.

***

False-Speak Will Doom Us

There is an interesting phenomenon that anyone who listens to politicians long enough will notice. Politicans--at least American ones--rarely speak in terms of reality. Instead, they speak in terms of the way they perceive things should be. Thus, Taiwan was China until 1979, when the US decided that the reality had somehow changed. Today, if you ask a US representative, he'll faithfully tell you that Taiwan is indeed a part of China, just like there was no genocide (just "acts of genocide") in Rwanda in 1994, and there is currently no genocide in Darfur.

It is in this false-speak, the worst indication of a vapid policy that has either (a) moral legitimacy or (b) power considerations, but not both, behind it, that American statesman thrive. But what we fail to realize is that our speech matters, and that the Chinese are manipulating the space between our speech and reality to their geopolitical advantage in every area of the globe.

To the people of Taiwan, it matters that the US does not recognize them. To these 23 million people, devoted trading partners of the US, who created a thriving capitalist democracy with their bootstraps, our position matters. And our refusal to take the hard stance with Taiwan, in recognition of the power positions on the ground, while claiming the world's moral high ground, is rank hypocrasy.

Taiwan's current status in the world is often known by the moniker "strategic ambiguity." Strategic ambiguity may be fine and dandy as a middle course in a State Department policy letter, but it rarely leads to good outcomes. As a foreign policy, it's a recipe for confusion, inaction, and regret that the United States seems doomed to repeat, because of its dual allegiances to morals and power considerations.

Though our current leader seems blind to this fact, our time as a superpower is limited. Such is the inevitable tragedy of great power politics. We as a country need to face this reality, and decide how we will lead the post-Cold-War world. Our greatest leaders--Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy--would have us do so in a moral fashion. Which course shall we choose? The moral one? Or the one that prolongs the inevitable, at the expense of our dignity?

We've already sacrificed 800,000 in Rwanda and 400,000 (and counting) in Darfur to the chopping block of strategic inaction. How many of Taiwan's 23 million will we add to that number?

The Iraq War

Judging future prospects from the past. Henry Kissinger himself writes, about Vietnam:

A conventional war is about control of territory; a guerrilla war is about the security of the population. Since the guerrilla army is not tied to the defense of any particular territory, it is in a position to determine the field of battle to a considerable extent and to regulate the casualties of both sides.

In a conventional war, a success rate in battle of 75 percent would guarantee victory. In a guerrilla war, protecting the population only 75 percent of the time ensures defeat. One hundred percent security in 75 percent of the country is far better than 75 percent security in 100 percent of the country. If the defending forces cannot bring about nearly perfect security for the population--at least in the area they consider essential--the guerrilla is bound to win sooner or later.

The basic equation of guerrilla war is as simple as it is difficult to execute: the guerrilla army wins as long as it can keep from losing; the conventional army is bound to lose unless it wins decisively. Stalemate almost never occurs. Any country engaging itself in a guerrilla war must be prepared for a long struggle. The guerrilla army can continue hit-and-run tactics for a long time even with greatly diminished forces. A clear-cut victory is very rare; successful guerrilla wars typically peter out over a long period of time.

I may be wrong, but this would seem to apply very well to our current conflict, and its lesson seems hardly optomistic.

Kissinger, Henry. Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 629.

Reihan on multiracial pride

Reihan is right, the proudly multiracial ought not to take offense at being asked about their race. That said, what Reihan misses is that Geetha Lakshminarayanan's multiracial pride might be something of a defense mechanism, and might have come out of her being constantly asked what she is. Timing is everything--was she first bugged about being multiracial or proud of it? I have no experience being multiracial, but I have been referred to as exotic, which led not so much to an existential crisis as to a realization that I'd probably get more attention of a certain kind in the Midwest than in certain parts of NYC, where every other person on the street looks just like me.

Reihan also discusses and debunks the "quasi-narcissism" of many upper middle class parents, one of whom is Asian and the other non-Asian:

"Our babies are sooooo cute." For real, yo, it's not that cool to be an upper-middle-class non-Asian person marrying an upper-middle-class Asian person. Seriously. No medals for you. Maybe next time. Call me when you marry someone from a Papuan cargo cult and ritually scar your toddlers with elaborate patterns that resemble the cheesecake murals emblazoned across WWII-era bombers like the Enola Gay. Then we'll talk.

This I'm not entirely sure of. No medals for you if you are a white man and your wife is Asian, but pairings are less common the other way around, so perhaps a few medals can be allocated.

The aforementioned chag

It's beginning to look a lot like Passover. 


Sam in his Sunday best. 


Matzo and Manishevitz. 


Why is there an orange on the seder plate?  


Everyone else tried it. I did not.  

The Filibuster

Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't the Democrats filibuster to...save the filibuster?

Can't you see it now? A small group of Democrats, mostly moderate (leave Feinstein and Kennedy at home) speaking for hours, their throats hoarse, to save democracy.

Even let someone like McCain join the fun.

I think it would make a great media image.

A good chag was had by all

Just got back from a seder; there may be pictures (mostly birds' eye view shots of Passover foods, and one of an especially fashionable seder host) once the BA is further along. I can't tell whether my having gone to two seders this year while leading an otherwise secular life makes me born-again or just an especially devoted procrastinator. I'm thinking the fact that I ate a bagel for lunch (and was spotted eating said bagel by co-blogger Nick Tarasen, who tsk tsked) means it's the latter.

And when I finish posting this, back to the BA...

So Princeton has an abstinence club. Good for Princeton. Chicago does not, as far as I know, have anything of the kind, but we do have shirts that clunkily read, "The University of Chicago: Where the only thing that goes down on you is your GPA." Princeton's abstinence club could make equally clunky shirts: "Princeton University: Where the only things that should be inflated are your grades."

The four questions

The following are frequently asked of me by others, but are still more frequently asked of me by myself:

1) What are you doing next year?

2) How much of your BA have you written?

3) How late is the library open on weekend nights?

4) Your BA is in French?

It's a bit late in the day to discover a religious objection to doing work on Passover, so BA it is. Or, it will be. To quote "The Continental" from the old Christopher Walken SNL skit, "But first, a glass of this fine Champagne." And by Champagne, I mean coffee, which will hopefully counteract some of my (ceremonial!) inebriation and permit me to reach page 20 of the Thing tonight.

Who gets to be a minority?

Two letters to the editor in the latest Maroon argue that Asians should be considered an underprivileged minority because, while Asians are on the whole better-off than whites in this country, some subsets of the huge category that is "Asian" are in fact worse-off. This is terrible logic; some segments of the white population are also worse-off, some segments of the Latino population (say, South American socialites), better-off, and so on. Affirmative action involves putting people into huge categories with the knowledge that many individuals will not be under- or overprivileged in ways that their group membership would imply. As someone with a real distain for putting people into categories that have nothing to do with their own actions but have everything to do with their race, self-proclaimed or perceived, I don't know whether I'd rather see people divided into Vietnamese and Japanese, Jewish and Nordic, African and Caribbean, or just into the big, broad categories of black, white, Asian, Latino, and Native American. I'd rather see none of this. I'd also rather not be at the library right now, but if the Jews are going to stay an overrepresented minority, stay at the library I must...

Page 15, people!

The BA is happening.

Things that I've learned in my BA mini-breaks this afternoon:

1) Matthew Yglesias is obsessed with goat.

2) "I think deep down, girls want to be feminine."

2) Haroset and Israeli Nutella do not make up a complete brunch. The time has come for something more substantial.

Classics Cafe Liveblogging

It is 2:06 PM. Classics Cafe is hopping with people studying Truth and Freedom, maybe Existence, but it's a Friday afternoon, so maybe not. I've got four windows open on my laptop: BA, Proust search engine, New York Times, and, well, this bloggy nonsense. Classics is all about looking like you're doing work but actually looking up all the time to scope out the other people "doing work," which makes for a pleasant change from the library, where, from what I can tell, people are actually doing work. The BA work will start in 10, 9, 8, 7....

Ccchhhhharoset

Today in Hebrew, we made haroset, the Passover food that looks, as our teacher admitted, something like baby food, but tastes good, assuming, as we established, that you don't have an aversion to any of the individual ingredients. One kid in the class doesn't like nuts, and when confronted with almonds, did not know what that food was called. He is, as far as we can tell, American, so this was pretty amusing. Another kid in the class, though Jewish, said he's not celebrating Passover, and refused to try any of the haroset, so our teacher yelled at him for being a "cosmopolitan." Then she told me I'm skinny and encouraged me to eat excessive amounts of matzo dipped in some kind of Israeli Nutella. I did, gladly, along with much haroset, which made for a weird but tasty breakfast indeed.

Movie review: "The Way We Were"

This is a movie about two immensely unappealing people. "Katie" (Barbra Streisand) comes across as incredibly annoying. And "Hubbell" (Robert Redford) is very tanned to the point of being orange, very blond and hairy, and kind of an asshole, and all of this is apparently supposed to explain why Katie can't get enough of him. The only possible explanation is that this film is, as I thought it might be, a sort of female version of "Annie Hall", a relic from an age (the 1970s) when a character's being a WASP was still reason enough to explain a Jewish character's romantic interest in him or her.

The opening sequence, though, feels very much like the beginning of "Rushmore"; between the two of them, Katie and Hubbell are shown participating in every activity on their college campus (she handles journalism and politics; he sticks with sports), much as Max Fisher is introduced through a barrage of images of his extracurricular activities at his prep school. The way the intros to both films jump around from showing one activity to the next promises an active movie later on, but while "Rushmore" follows through, "The Way We Were" kind of trails off. The movie also must have influenced "Pretty in Pink"--poor, unconventionally attractive girl with geeky-guy sidekick falls for preppy creep who inexplicably likes her back. But Katie, though, ends up with "David X. Cohen," whom we never actually see, but who, it is implied, is no Robert Redford.

But the movie that this really brought to mind, oddly enough, was "Arguing the World," a documentary about four politically-active Jewish men from New York City who all started out on the left and all came from families with very little money. Historically speaking, Katie could have been one of their sisters. But while the New York intellectuals of "Arguing the World" pursue political thought to its fullest, Katie a) is told it's embarassing to be political, and b) considers the presence of Robert Redford in her bed to be reason enough to abandon her political activities. Things probably work out better for the Irving Howes and Irving Kristols of the world than for the Katies; then again, Barbra Streisand herself, who came from a background not unlike Katie's, is doing just fine.

Watch out, socialites

The New York Times warns against the dangers of being too rich and too thin.

How bloggers "really" spend their time

Explication de texte + reflexive Hebrew verbs + much-needed vacuuming and laundry-doing = no time for blogging. So this is the post for today (yesterday). Bonsoir, and lila tov.

What are the odds?

This article, on student writing-contest winners, mentions all three high schools attended by my immediate family. Considering that two of the three don't get much press, this is worth noting.

Positive peer pressure, Part II; plus Brodyism refuted, Part II

Jenn convinced me to go running today, not by blogging about it, but by, you know, having me go running with her. The blogosphere is seemingly filled with BA-finishers as well as sporty types. Who knew?

Ah, poor Jane Brody, whose life's work is to keep America, or at least the Upper West Side, as scrawny as possible, for health reasons only, of course. Turns out "people who are modestly overweight actually have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight." The reason for this, researchers found, is that many women, size 2 to 8, and men of similar dimensions die unneccessarily each year by getting trampled at the Barneys Semi-Annual Warehouse Sale. It makes you think.

I got Pierced

Tonight, for the first time since my freshman year, I ate in the Pierce dining hall. It seemed so different and yet so the same. The food looks a bit more limp than in Bartlett, but has the advantage of being less ambitious. Pseudo-gourmet tends to be a mistake in cafeterias, and Bartlett, home of the many-topping pasta, the ironically homey diner station, and various vegan horrors, is undeniably an ambitious enterprise.

In other culinary news, today in Hebrew class we learned about gefilte fish, or at least the two people in the class who hadn't already encountered it got an in-depth explanation. Only one girl in the class admitted to actually liking the stuff from the jar, and I really felt for her, since it reminded me of when I was the only person in a French class two years ago who confessed to not being fully against the Iraq war. It's hard to voice a minority opinion in the classroom, but somebody's got to do it.

Greatness

From Paul Rudnick's "Shouts & Murmurs" piece, "My Living Will," in the latest New Yorker:

5. Do not resuscitate me before noon.

10. If there is any family dispute over my medical condition, it must be settled with a dreidel.

11. Even if I remain in a persistent vegetative state for more than fifteen years, that still doesn’t mean bangs.

What's wrong with multitasking?

From a concerned NYT letter-writer:

I wish that what David Brooks wrote [about young people today having conservative sexual mores] were true.

My daughter is a sophomore at an Ivy League college. She talks of girls there, even those successfully navigating pre-med programs, who have a steady diet of casual sex.

My IQ falls with each passing minute

I see this headline and think, "Oh neat, there's a new pope, and he's black. Barriers are totally being broken these days!" And then I look more closely and that's not it at all. My fuzzy mind is just that much more progressive than the outside world...

I see this word on my Hebrew xeroxed worksheet and spend a really long time trying to sound it out (no vowels, argh). Korneflahkess? Korenahflahkhass? I look around and see that my table-mates are reading Kant and Weber. I look back at the page: Kvarnehplax?! And then I look at the word in context: Cornflakes. Oh dear.

UnColumbia Unbecoming, plus Unrelated

The screening's been cancelled. No foul play, they just don't have the tape yet, so no kerfuffle.

Unrelated: To whom it may concern, I have not only made it to the library, but have also made the necessary xeroxes, so homework may begin at any moment.

Also unrelated: A while back, on this very blog, I asked why sorority girls wear sweatpants so much more frequently than non-sorority types. (To new readers and the unperceptive: I fall under the latter category.) Another, similar question was bothering me today: Why does spring start so much earlier for sorority girls than for the unaffiliated? My switch from jeans, boots, and black shirt to tank top, pleated skirt, and ballet flats happens somewhere in mid-May, at the earliest; sorority girls seem to break out their ruffle skirts, spaghetti tanks, and flip-flops on the first day it stops snowing. It's not that they dress more revealingly than most other girls, but that they don't wait for actual, honest-to-goodness warm weather before losing the layers. Does anyone know why this might be the case? Feminist, post-feminist, and gender-neutral interpretations are all welcome.

The strange cult of the WASP man

While Portnoy and Woody Allen may have celebrated the shiksa, it's the shikso, so to speak, who's getting all the press these days. From Dustin Hoffman's eternal obsession with being non-blond (via Bamber) to a "Modern Love" column in the NYT Style section in which a woman, I'm guessing of the Semitic persuasion, says wistfully of her ex, "I remembered looking into his almond-shaped blue eyes and marveling at the perfect shape of his WASPy nose," it seems that WASP men are this week what Bobo chic was a month or so ago. (This Thursday, DOC is showing The Way We Were, a movie which, my mother informs me, is about a Jewish woman's unrequited love for a Robert Redford.)

Here, I'm afraid, I just don't get it. As someone whose first real celebrity crush was on Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore, but who is equal-opportunity enough to also appreciate, say, Peter Sarsgaard, I don't know what to make of this new, but not new, craze. I think what the world needs is a massive screening of Yossi and Jagger. Or maybe I just feel like watching the film for, ahem, academic reasons.

Kerfuffle prediction

Tomorrow I'm seeing "Columbia Unbecoming"--I certainly hope tasty Middle-Eastern food (if only Chickpea would open a branch in Hyde Park) will be part of the deal, but if not, that's ok, too. Much kerfuffling, though, had better ensue, or else it will be time that would have been better spent doing my own pseudo-Middle Eastern pseudo-studies.